The US president’s executive order ends the battle over the platform’s future. But between exemptions, Chinese quotas and political controls, doubts remain about the real scope of the decision by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Italian by La Repubblica – Italian Tech
The executive order signed on 25 September 2025 by President Trump put an end to the long and complicated saga of “divestitures”, the forced sale of the American branch of TikTok imposed by a law passed by Congress to protect national security.
The key point of this agreement is that it has transformed TikTok from an entertainment platform into a battleground between national security, freedom of expression and US-China diplomacy.
In the future structure, “TikTok USA” will be a joint venture under US law, with its registered office in the US, with at least 80 per cent of the capital in the hands of American partners and up to 20 per cent owned by “foreign adversaries or entities”.
The algorithms, the “codes” — whatever that word means — and decisions on content moderation will be under the control of the joint venture. US citizens’ data will have to reside in a cloud infrastructure managed by a US company and processed in such a way that it is not under the control of a “foreign adversary”.
Finally, the executive order provides for ‘intensive monitoring of software updates, algorithms and data flows by trusted US partners, and requires that all content recommendation models, including algorithms, that use US user data be retrained and monitored by such trusted partners’.
On paper, the result achieved by the Trump administration would appear to be a remarkable success, since ByteDance — and China — have been forced to accept a seemingly very penalising agreement, but in reality, this is not exactly the case.
The contradictions of the executive order
Firstly, it is reasonable to have some doubts about the legitimacy of the numerous postponements granted by the US administration for the conclusion of the forced sale of TikTok.
Secondly, it is somewhat difficult to argue that leaving up to 20 per cent of control over the future joint venture in Chinese hands qualifies as a transfer of full control over the platform’s operations. In fact, one might wonder whether simply reducing the shareholding of “foreign adversaries” is sufficient to eliminate effective control over the operation of TikTok US, when Congress had clearly decided to sever all ties with China.
Thirdly, one cannot fail to notice the contradiction between declaring by law that TikTok is managed by “foreign adversaries” and allowing these “foreign adversaries” to remain within the joint venture, retaining all the rights that derive from being co-owners.
The political side of the executive order
The executive order makes the terms of the mediation between President Trump and President Xi quite clear.
The decision to give the US executive branch exclusive power to investigate compliance with the law requiring the forced sale means that no one outside the Department of Justice — and therefore the US president — can get involved in the TikTok operation. This pre-emptively eliminates the risk of legal action by private entities such as civil rights NGOs or laws enacted by individual EU Member States that could compromise the agreement and its implementation.
In other words, the executive order establishes a sort of shared political governance between the US and China to be managed through the presence of a minority but significant Chinese representation in the corporate control apparatus, without anyone other than the executives of the two countries having a say.
Quis custodies…
This conclusion is reinforced by the consequences of maintaining a presence in the administrative bodies of TikTok USA or, in any case, having the possibility of exercising the rights of minority shareholders. This allows “foreign adversary entities” to have direct access to information on the management decisions of the directors and on the use of the technologies and data that the new company will receive as a dowry. This, of course, means being able to report any substantial violations of the agreements made at the political level to the appropriate authorities, with all the consequences that this entails.
Legal control over the company’s operations is one thing, but political control is another.
The impact on content and its monetisation
One of the reasons why the Trump administration accepted this mediation is represented by a number: 170 million. This is the number of TikTok users mentioned in the executive order, and the number of people who could potentially have expressed, for example in the mid-term elections next November 2026, their dissent regarding the permanent closure of the platform.
It will be the users themselves who will test the effectiveness of the executive order since, as mentioned, the new joint venture will control the training of algorithms, manage user profiling and moderate content.
It will therefore be interesting to see if, and in what terms, all this will change the nature of the videos suggested to users. Will those that, according to the US Congress, pose a threat to national security be eliminated or reduced and replaced with more edifying and “patriotic” content? And how will content creators react if monetisation collapses?
Only time will tell, but it should already be noted that such an option — orienting content towards “acceptable” themes — would not be too different from what China itself has established, for example, with its rules on the development of AI that respects socialist values, as in the case of DeepSeek R1.
The political role of freedom of expression
The legal power to determine how TikTok operates has not taken into account a cumbersome elephant in the room: freedom of expression.
Overly restricting users’ enjoyment of the platform would risk triggering legal challenges that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. This could even call into question the entire framework of mediation painstakingly achieved between the two presidents, bringing everyone back to square one, but in much more complex conditions to manage.
Such an issue, however, does not only concern the US, since the European Digital Services Act (DSA) also contains censorship rules that entrust private individuals (trusted flaggers) with the role of reporting even lawful but “inappropriate” content and large platforms with the role of deciding independently whether, how and when to remove it without prior supervision by a judge.
A new model for US-China relations?
More generally, it will be interesting to see whether this US-China mediation is destined to remain an isolated event or whether it will become a paradigm for eliminating bans and restrictions imposed on technology companies such as Huawei.
This hypothesis is not without ground, given that the same approach is followed by China itself, where, since at least 2005, foreign companies have been able to operate through joint ventures with local partners.
The crisis of rights and the prevalence of political interests
An overall reading of the TikTok affair suggests three points for reflection.
The first is purely political: the umpteenth confrontation between (in this case) national security and freedom of expression shows that the curtailment of rights should only take place in exceptional circumstances, with extreme caution and without mechanisms that prevent it from being eliminated.
The second point is geopolitical: this agreement is not just a commercial compromise or an armed truce between two superpowers. Rather, it represents the consecration of that technological neo-medievalism in the name of which technology, sovereignty and representation lose their identity and become confused with one another.
The third point concerns the construction of social consciousness—or its deconstruction: eliminating diversity and constructing partisan narratives based on nudging made possible by technological profiling makes it possible to elevate the manipulative dystopias constructed by Edward Bernays, his heirs and his imitators on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific to a higher level.